Keldysh Field Theory for Driven Open Quantum Systems

Recent experimental developments in diverse areas - ranging from cold atomic gases over light-driven semiconductors to microcavity arrays - move systems into the focus, which are located on the interface of quantum optics, many-body physics and statistical mechanics. They share in common that coherent and driven-dissipative quantum dynamics occur on an equal footing, creating genuine non-equilibrium scenarios without immediate counterpart in condensed matter. This concerns both their non-thermal flux equilibrium states, as well as their many-body time evolution. It is a challenge to theory to identify novel instances of universal emergent macroscopic phenomena, which are tied unambiguously and in an observable way to the microscopic drive conditions. In this review, we discuss some recent results in this direction. Moreover, we provide a systematic introduction to the open system Keldysh functional integral approach, which is the proper technical tool to accomplish a merger of quantum optics and many-body physics, and leverages the power of modern quantum field theory to driven open quantum systems.Comment: 73 pages, 13 figure

A learning algorithm with emergent scaling behavior for classifying phase transitions

Machine learning-inspired techniques have emerged as a new paradigm for analysis of phase transitions in quantum matter. In this work, we introduce a supervised learning algorithm for studying critical phenomena from measurement data, which is based on iteratively training convolutional networks of increasing complexity, and test it on the transverse field Ising chain and q = 6 Potts model. At the continuous Ising transition, we identify scaling behavior in the classification accuracy, from which we infer a characteristic classification length scale. It displays a power-law divergence at the critical point, with a scaling exponent that matches with the diverging correlation length. Our algorithm correctly identifies the thermodynamic phase of the system and extracts scaling behavior from projective measurements, independently of the basis in which the measurements are performed. Furthermore, we show the classification length scale is absent for the q=6 Potts model, which has a first order transition and thus lacks a divergent correlation length. The main intuition underlying our finding is that, for measurement patches of sizes smaller than the correlation length, the system appears to be at the critical point, and therefore the algorithm cannot identify the phase from which the data was drawn

Dynamics of measured many-body quantum chaotic systems

We consider the dynamics of continuously measured many-body chaotic quantum systems. Focusing on the observable of state purification, we analytically describe the limits of strong and weak measurement rate, where in the latter case monitoring up to time scales exponentially long in the numbers of particles is required. We complement the analysis of the limiting regimes with the construction of an effective replica theory providing information on the stability and the symmetries of the respective phases. The analytical results are tested by comparison to exact numerical simulations for a measured SYK model.Comment: 4pages, 3 figure

Quantum dynamics in strongly driven random dipolar magnets

The random dipolar magnet LiHo_xY_(1−x)F₄ enters a strongly frustrated regime for small Ho³⁺ concentrations with x < 0.05. In this regime, the magnetic moments of the Ho³⁺ ions experience small quantum corrections to the common Ising approximation of LiHo_xY_(1−x)F₄, which lead to a Z₂-symmetry breaking and small, degeneracy breaking energy shifts between different eigenstates. Here we show that destructive interference between two almost degenerate excitation pathways burns spectral holes in the magnetic susceptibility of strongly driven magnetic moments in LiHo_xY_(1−x)F₄. Such spectral holes in the susceptibility, microscopically described in terms of Fano resonances, can already occur in setups of only two or three frustrated moments, for which the driven level scheme has the paradigmatic Λ shape. For larger clusters of magnetic moments, the corresponding level schemes separate into almost isolated many-body Λ schemes, in the sense that either the transition matrix elements between them are negligibly small or the energy difference of the transitions is strongly off-resonant to the drive. This enables the observation of Fano resonances, caused by many-body quantum corrections to the common Ising approximation also in the thermodynamic limit. We discuss its dependence on the driving strength and frequency as well as the crucial role that is played by lattice dissipation

Signatures of self-organized criticality in an ultracold atomic gas

Self-organized criticality is an elegant explanation of how complex structures emerge and persist throughout nature, and why such structures often exhibit similar scale-invariant properties. Although self-organized criticality is sometimes captured by simple models that feature a critical point as an attractor for the dynamics, the connection to real-world systems is exceptionally hard to test quantitatively. Here we observe three key signatures of self-organized criticality in the dynamics of a driven–dissipative gas of ultracold potassium atoms: self-organization to a stationary state that is largely independent of the initial conditions; scale-invariance of the final density characterized by a unique scaling function; and large fluctuations of the number of excited atoms (avalanches) obeying a characteristic power-law distribution. This work establishes a well-controlled platform for investigating self-organization phenomena and non-equilibrium criticality, with experimental access to the underlying microscopic details of the system